


imprinting

by fairbanks



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Mouth injury, Multi, Professor/Student Relationship, Rescue, Stalking, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:42:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22582708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairbanks/pseuds/fairbanks
Summary: He doesn’t think he’s ever been the subject of such intense, singular focus, and he nearly laughs at how absurd it all is. They are monsters, whatever they really are, shells they fill with what understanding they can scrape together of the human form and he- he is garden they harvest from. He is their live model now, and has been for some weeks, and he isn’t nearly as terrified as he should be.or Lionel Elliott learns it could be worse
Relationships: Anatomy Students/Dr. Lionel Elliott
Comments: 14
Kudos: 195
Collections: The Magnus Archives Rare Pairs 2020





	imprinting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nothingbutregret](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothingbutregret/gifts).



> sorry, this went total bonkers from the prompt i think. i hope it still satisfies though!

Lionel’s started taking long walks before bed, a desperate attempt to clear his head.

Before- just _before_ , the time preceding this horrible little class and the dread that floods his life, fills his lungs and refuses to be decent enough to drown him and be done with it. Before now Lionel was far too nervous, too cowardly to walk alone in the evening. His neighborhood is safe enough, the worst that happens here is uni students from neighboring areas spilling over on wilder nights and making a ruckus. Still the unknown variables, the stories of violence and mugging, they kept him safe in his house with a cup of tea and the latest medical journal.

Now he finds that fear rather laughable, really. He thinks he’s started growing apathy like an armor around him, regards the attempt to protect himself from _that_ class with dull fascination. If he doesn’t care about the sound of bones cracking, arms contorting, eyes glassy and horrendously normal staring at him, into his skin- if he doesn’t care then he doesn’t shatter. He doesn’t wake up screaming.

He certainly no longer worries about muggings or drunks or whatever the mostly empty streets hold in the dark. Even as a man humming a strange, horrible tune stumbles down the street across from him Lionel isn’t afraid. It’s only when the man starts following him that he gets uneasy.

In a way the sudden burst of fear is refreshing, clears his head of a daze he didn’t notice before. The jagged man stops when he stops, sways on his feet still humming, still across the street. Lionel takes a step and he does too, a step back and the man follows. It’s a twisted mirror and Lionel doesn’t know what to say, how to react.

“I’ll call the police,” he tells the man, voice barely shaking. Even now he can’t help but want to do that just so he can take the next day off, a perfect excuse no one in the faculty can deny him. Poor Elliott, stalked in his own neighborhood. Maybe if the man hurts him he can step down from the rest of the semester.

The thought sends ice through him, the depths of that desperation, that he could possibly wish for this to get worse. It’s as though the humming man knows because his tune gets louder, he starts walking across the street. For the first time Lionel realizes the song _hurts_ , there’s no other way to put it. It hurts, not just his ears but his teeth, the tips of his fingers. 

He’s frozen in place, shaking as the horrible man walks under the lamp light, no longer shadowed. His eyes are bloodshot, his skin sallow, but worse is the way his lips swell like overly ripe fruit, like old infection. Like the song is hurting him too.

“Listen,” the man rasps, limp hair too long and blowing away at the force of his whistling when it sways towards his mouth, and Lionel wants to beg the man to stop, wants to run, wants

to sing along.

\--

Lionel wakes somewhere cold, face to the dirt. A glance up and he sees trees- a forest, an outskirts, somewhere he doesn’t know. His mouth hurts like it’s been sandpapered, and it’s with a despairing groan he sees the monstrous man from before still nearby.

“Again,” the man says, and it floods Lionel’s mind with the memory of whistling that horrible tune, of making wordless sounds to mimic the song as tears streamed down his face. 

He can’t even beg, doesn’t bother sitting up as his lips try to form the right shape, get his lungs to work. He’ll die here, he thinks groggily, and then who will teach that class? Will they wait every day at their desks as he rots? A laugh catches in his throat, hysterical over the fact they’ll likely miss him more than his colleagues, his distant family.

A loud thud cuts off the man’s merry tune, a jarring enough sound that it snaps the horrible spell that makes Lionel contort himself to try and sing along. It’s the dull smack of flesh against something solid and hard, and Lionel wants to weep with relief when he realizes it was a blow against the singing man, that perhaps he’s been saved.

Dull voices sound against the singer’s outrage, and Lionel can twist his head against the dirt enough to watch the man scramble to his feet. His ears still ring with that terrible song but he starts to hear more than yelling from the man and calm reply. 

“He is not yours,” his rescuer states, and Lionel swears he knows that voice, though it’s difficult to place.

He’s avoided looking up, terrified to be caught up again in his attacker’s song, terrified of what this creature may do to a well meaning savior. That voice forces his hand, makes him glance up and up, finally notice that his rescuer is not one but many, a group of the most average sneakers and jeans he’s ever seen.

Up further, to dull white tshirts, and further still to faces that slip his mind yet still he recognizes if only for the way his stomach clenches in well ingrained fear.

“Max?” he manages, spitting out dirt and quite sure now he must be dreaming, hallucinating. His terrible students don’t even glance at him, only look to the now silent man who practically vibrates with a rage that shocks Lionel with its depth.

“He can _sing_ -” the terrible man tries then recoils at the sound that suddenly fills the air, not unlike the screeching of nails against chalk but coming from inside his student’s frozen forms.

Lionel wants to weep for the sound to _stop_ , not even a sound with how physical it feels against his skin, but the singer beats him to it. “Stop!” he shrieks, and Lionel watches the man finally crumble and flee, followed only by the eyes of his students.

Who all look to him in unison when Lionel’s attacker vanishes from sight, and despite their rescue Lionel feels no safer than he did before. “What are you?” he finally manages to gasp from bleeding lips. “What do you want?”

“To learn,” one of them says in a way that feels like they all say it.

Lionel laughs, each hysterical burst of air sending jolts of agony up his throat. He closes his eyes as he tries to cover his raw lips to stop, just _stop_ it all for a moment

When he opens them again he’s back at home.

It takes a dizzy moment to understand that, the familiar old wallpaper and smell of stale tea achingly familiar but his position anything but familiar. He’s on the ground, back against the hardwood of his living area, a blanket thrown over him not unlike a corpse and covering one of his eyes, the other side slipped down enough he can see.

He yanks the blanket off in alarm, fingers going to his aching mouth as he tries to swallow and feels he’s only managed to light his entire esophagus on fire. He must have passed out, he thinks, the pain refusing him the sanctuary of denial that the whole, sorry night didn’t happen. Which means his students brought him home- which means his students knew where he _lived._ That horrifying little reality nearly has him laughing again, but he’s learned his lesson.

After what feels an age Lionel gets up, keen on focusing entirely on getting himself water and nothing else. His legs want to deny him but he makes it to the little kitchen, fumbles for a glass and mostly succeeds in his bid to ignore everything else. At least up until he notices the note.

There on the counter is a simple piece of paper and a can of chicken soup he does not remember owning. ‘ _Get well,’_ the note reads in a tone that feels far too much a command for Lionel’s comfort. He picks up the can and places it right back down when it’s far heavier than it should be.

Both go in the trash and Lionel goes back to ignoring everything but water and his aching throat.

\--

A week into his recovery and Lionel realizes this could all be a blessing in disguise. The doctors are baffled when he goes to them, end up deciding he must have coughed or screamed his throat raw in the throes of a fever. Lionel plays along, unwilling to explain what really happened- unsure if it really happened. That’s the sort of nonsense one told the Magnus Institute, usually for attention or from deep delusions, not respectable doctors who would most certainly not understand.

The blessing is that they're so baffled he’s fairly certain he could milk this injury and ‘illness’ for long enough the school would be forced to replace him. That or cancel the class entirely, and though he’s made enough noise trying to get out of it he feels rumors may start he’d have his doctor to back him up. 

It’s a balm to consider it, an out he didn’t have before against the now certainty that something is very, _very_ wrong with his class. Before he would have given a great deal to have this chance, would already be calling the administration and croaking his way through an explanation but-

Lionel wishes he could say it’s purely a moral standpoint, that someone else would no doubt have to take the class and suffer as he has, either this semester or the next. In truth he feels the strangest burst of _guilt_ at the idea of abandoning them now, after they saved his life. Rationally he knows it’s absurd, dangerously so, that if anything they seemed to be staking a claim rather than saving his life. But they did save it, he’s certain of that, and so far they really do only seem interested in learning the human body for purposes he doesn’t care to consider.

When he ends up going in to class only two weeks later he tries to tell himself it’s for his own safety. They knew where he lived, and maybe staying near them would keep that violent tune of a man from knocking on his door. Maybe when the class was over he could look into transferring elsewhere, get far away. In truth he’s always enjoyed being the stranger in a new spot, just out of place enough to feel it, every simple thing a little more fascinating.

The group sits as they always do, as though he hadn’t been gone for two weeks on medical leave, as though they hadn’t apparently dragged his unconscious body back from an attack Lionel still tries not to think too deeply on. They don’t smile, nothing in their eyes gives away amusement or a shared secret. As always they simply wait for him to start, and the familiarity is almost comforting, if Lionel’s feeling particularly delusional.

“I can’t speak much,” he tells them, a much better croak than before but his throat is in the final stages of healing and still very sore. At least his lips and mouth no longer look a mess, cut up in places but not swollen and raw like ground meat. “So we’ll use the board.”

The class goes much the same as it has, questions and answers that this time he writes out for them. He makes an effort he didn’t before, ignores the strangeness of their questions and offers the best answers he can with the unsettling understanding that these students are not human as he knows it. 

They focus on the throat, vocal chords, how the voice works. By the end of class he notices a richness to their voices that they once lacked and tries to find some level of pride in apparently being helpful.

On his way home he tries to bend his mind around the inherent horror of the whole situation, to see it in a new light. Maybe these… students, as loath as he is to use the word, maybe they just wish to be human in a way they are not. Maybe their plans aren’t nefarious in nature, they did save his life from some other monstrosity that was much clearer in his plans to do harm. Maybe they will simply go on their way after this and live as normal lives as they can.

Yes, that’s about as much delusion as Lionel’s willing to accept from himself, he thinks with a hysterical laugh as he closes and locks his front door, then the second lock he installed last week, then the deadbolt he installed the week before.

If he’s being honest it is rather fascinating to watch them try to become human, in an uncanny way. Lionel wouldn’t have become a doctor if he didn’t find the human body intensely interesting in its endless mechanisms. He wonders what he’d find dissecting one of the students. Perfectly normal vocal chords, he hopes, after all the wrist cramping writing he had to do on the board to explain them.

\--

Somehow everything gets far more bizarre after that, in ways Lionel didn’t expect.

Its little things- Erika asks him if he liked the soup, and when he nervously explained he had to throw it out because he’s fairly sure it went bad (or wasn’t soup at all most likely) they ask him about soup. Soup, of all things. He spends a good deal of the class explaining rot and the harm ingesting decayed things can do to the body and they listen just as intently as anything.

He even builds the courage to ask where they got the soup, to which Piotr (or was it Jan?) tells him they made it. It takes even more courage to explain one didn’t simply _make_ a sealed can. They take it well, though he isn’t thrilled to find a bowl of thin, unpleasant looking broth on his desk the next class period. At least he’s able to convince them he’ll eat it after class and throws it out the window and onto the nearby bushes when they leave.

Their sway over him isn’t unlike Stockholm Syndrome, he decides when he starts to feel something alarmingly like fondness over the group. His mind is doing acrobatic leaps to avoid dealing with how much his world has turned on its head, terrible music in his nightmares and the crackle of bones contorting under skin in his waking. 

Maybe that’s why he isn’t as horrified as he should be when Fulan follows him home one day, still asking questions. 

They already know where he lives, he reasons, and strangely more than anything he’s baffled to see them separated. He’s never seen one without the others before, and when he asks Fulan simply says they’re ‘taking care of the noise.’

It isn’t until he’s nervously making tea in his kitchen that he understands. There’s a terrible sound from outside, a familiar sound, like the whole of the air is singing that _song_ again. Lionel’s hands shake so badly he drops the tea cup he was readying and it shatters soundlessly against the floor.

All the while Fulan stands stock still in his front room, staring out the window without even his normal pretense of breathing and natural fidgeting. He could be a watchful statue and lord above, what is Lionel’s life that he feels safer for it?

“What’s happening?” he tries to ask, lips and throat buzzing with phantom pain until Fulan raises a hand without even looking to him, fingers pressing to Lionel’s mouth to keep him quiet- fingers waxier than they should be.

Fulan’s fingers only drop when the world is silent again and they both stand glued to the spot, staring out at the peaceful view of his relatively safe neighborhood. How could no one have heard that, Lionel wonders, how are people not shrieking on the streets? But no, nothing stirs, only the leaves in the wind and a neighbor walking with blissful ignorance to her rubbish bin to throw a bag away.

She waves cheerfully at him and he waves weakly back, wondering the sight he must make pale and shaking at the window with Fulan unblinking beside him.

The rest of his students file in while he goes back to making tea, and he’s glad he knows better than to bother with pleasantries as he pours only himself a cup. He doesn’t have enough cups to go around anyway.

“What happened?” he tries, unsurprised when they say nothing and stand around him like they’re studying how his throat moves when he swallows. They probably are, and he’s far too tired to worry about it now. “That man- was it him?”

“He will be quiet now,” John tells him- or Juan, maybe.

“I- thank you,” Lionel finds himself saying, baffled to find he means it.

\--

His students come over occasionally now.

Mostly it’s to watch him eat, which Lionel really isn’t much of a fan of but he supposes one must make concessions in the name of gratitude. He makes the mistake of finally offering them some digestives and having then to watch Erika eat one surprisingly competently before just letting the pulverized crumbs fall out of her mouth and onto the table. The mash is uncomfortably dry.

“We’ll work on that,” he informs them as he cleans up the mess, resigning himself to the task of explaining saliva.

One strange night he’s sitting with a few fingers of whiskey and trying to watch the news, disturbingly used to the group haunting the room like unpleasant artwork. Usually they just watch him, ask questions here and there and leave as abruptly as they came. Tonight Pavel (Piotr? They’ve gotten a little better at differentiating themselves) touches him.

It’s a simple touch, unnervingly innocent, just Pavel’s hand against his forearm. Only Fulan’s ever touched him that he really remembers, not quite right fingers to Lionel’s lips. Pavel’s hand feels just as wrong, like skin stretched over plastic fingers. He presses too hard, almost to the point of pain, and Lionel’s frozen in his armchair as Pavel says, “He’s warm.”

“It’s the blood,” says Jan, he thinks, as Juan and Piotr come over to touch him as well. “It keeps the meat warm.”

“The um- the alcohol-” Lionel tries to explain, starts to as Juan’s hand touches his neck and Piotr’s his other arm. None of them feel right, even stranger when their cool hands suddenly flush with heat.

“There’s the blood,” Erika points out as she touches the flush to his cheeks, stretching his skin almost like a pinch. Her hands go hot too and Lionel thinks he should critique their temperature, if he wasn’t so terrified.

“That hurts,” he stammers out, greatly surprised when all their hands go a touch gentler, softer. In a way it’s worse because this- he doesn’t hate this. It’s been a long time since he’s been touched at all, not when he long ago gave up dating for his studies and never truly came back on the horse, as it were, and his friends are the reserved type, handshakes and little else. 

He doesn’t think he’s ever been the subject of such intense, singular focus, and he nearly laughs at how absurd it all is. They are monsters, whatever they really are, shells they fill with what understanding they can scrape together of the human form and he- he is garden they harvest from. He is their live model now, and has been for some weeks, and he isn’t nearly as terrified as he should be. 

With a dry swallow he lifts his arm, breath catching when the rest come over, when Fulan and Jan press strange fingertips to the crook of his elbow, the soft curve of his wrist. He taps his own fingers to guide them down the long line of his arm. “Here, that’s the brachioradialis, feel the way it shifts?” He curls his arm and they flock to feel the tension give and take, still careful in a way that surprises him. 

“Muscle is more… malleable, than you- that you’ve managed,” Lionel manages, unsettled with peeling back the act and addressing what he knows they really want from his lessons. They do not acknowledge it, a moment that feels monumental to him, just watch with familiar, placid intensity and Lionel feels strangely relieved. “Feel the way they move in my arm, their give. You have the makeup of skin well enough but without the framework of muscle around bone it will fall apart.”

It’s safe for a few moments, just a training exercise, just another lesson. It remains safe until their hands move to feel other muscles, up his arm and over his chest, to his thigh and that- yes, that’s when he can’t deny he’s far more affected than he wants to be. Enough arousal from the treatment to give himself away, and the thought of them noticing, them _asking_ for that particular anatomy lesson breaks his last nerve.

Lionel shoots up, runs a hand through his hair and turns to see all seven sets of eyes staring back at him as though this were no different than any other class. “I- it’s time to sleep,” he offers lamely, hurries to his room and closes the door sharply behind him.

The students don’t follow, a blessed relief and mortifying in how it disappoints some small part of him. “Get a grip, Lionel,” he mutters to himself as he aggressively pulls his blanket up to his chin. When he falls asleep it’s uneasily, strange music replaced with waxy hands.

\--

The semester is nearing an end and Lionel is relieved for reasons much different than he ever expected. Before he just wanted them gone, wanted the nightmare over, and now he wants to escape his own awkwardness. Maybe with his students out of sight they’ll also be out of mind and he’ll stop thinking about their hands hard and warm on him.

Not that they pick up on anything, they act the same as they always have if not a little more tactile now. Just the other day John held his hand and asked if he felt like his meat was right, which Lionel assumes meant if his hand felt real in Lionel’s. It did, and so did Pavel’s jaw when he pushed Lionel’s palm against it, or Juan’s chest when he did the same to his collar. 

They felt human, which did nothing to help Lionel’s irritating fixation- because really, of all the students to have inappropriate thoughts about it had to be these ones? He’d prefer being a run-of-the-mill creep than whatever this made him, though he tries to reason this is more Stockholm-like syndrome. That he’s just worn down, because he very much is.

He’ll miss them, that’s what shocks him more than anything. It’s entirely possible they’ll kill him or worse before they scurry off into the sunset after graduation but he can’t deny he’ll miss them, in a way. Maybe it’s that part of him that enjoys the strange, long-buried after years and years routine, of placid normalcy.

It’s that vague melancholy that leads him to accept their invitation back to where they stay after their last class. There’s an exam but somehow Lionel thinks they won’t bother with it. They truly only wanted the knowledge in a way none of his other students ever had, practical and guileless. There’s an excellent chance they’ll kill him and his fear is so broken he merely chuckles at the thought.

Their house is practically empty, though he notices a few things that clearly mirror his own home. The chair in the same place as his armchair, the kitchen table against the wall with too little seating. He wonders if they’ll go harass an interior design class next, haunting their way through every facet of human life. 

“We need to work on the functionality of eating,” he tells them as they watch him set out some fruit he picked up from the store. If this was a trap to destroy him he may as well teach them one last thing, and a more practical concern in the long run.

And so his afternoon becomes explaining teeth and throats and stomach acid, the workings that make food into energy- the way one chews and swallows, doesn’t just chew and chew and chew and stare at him while doing so. It’d be amusing in a way if it weren’t so terribly wrong how they moved, how they stared, how they were so normal yet so very off.

When he demonstrates chewing and swallowing yet again Pavel stands, presses his too human hand against Lionel’s abdomen as if he could get a feel for the workings of his gut that way. A fresh and almost euphoric wave of terror washes over Lionel at how very certain he is that Pavel could keep pushing until he reached his organs, rip right through his skin and pull out his intestines to see first hand.

And yet Lionel finds himself unbuttoning his shirt so Pavel can press against skin, fingers trembling around the buttons. Pavel’s palm is warm, then Erika’s, then Juan’s- all so disturbing human, so distressingly blank.

They don’t hurt him. They don’t kill him or maim him, though he knows without a shadow of a doubt they could. That they thought about it --

By the time he reaches this point of his statement Lionel has the vague feeling he’s oversharing. He never intended to tell this man- Jonathan? He thinks? - about his troubling reaction when his students first touched him and he most certainly was not going to tell him about he still thinks of it with a guilty fixation.

He wasn’t going to tell him about how their hands mapped his body in their kitchen, nonsexual in every way but still so charged to him. How they counted his ribs, felt the stutter of his heart and the heave of his breath. How they were gentle without a touch of the kind feeling gentleness should bring.

Lionel finishes and blinks, shaken by his own conduct. The Head Archivist doesn’t look much better, visibly uncomfortable under the poor, thin veil of his professionalism.

“Well,” the archivist says with a cough.

Lionel offers a hasty, “You did say everything. I mean. I wasn’t planning on saying all of that but-”

“No you were… thorough.”

Lionel rubs a hand over his face, unsure of this embarrassment is better than the near constant fear since all this started. “They left me something. An apple.”

He pulls out the plastic bag before Jonathan can say anything in that judgmental way, vindictively satisfied when the archivist recoils at the sight of it. “Ugh that’s-”

“Deeply unpleasant? Yes.” The teeth are curled in a smile and Lionel tries not to look down at it. He’s spent enough time wondering if this is their idea of a gift, a threat or a joke.

He’s not terribly surprised when the Head Archivist informs him it’s not proof- really, what proof did he have other than his scarred lips and equally scarred nerves? What did he hope would happen coming here? He isn’t even sure he wants them hunted down or stopped or… fixed in some way. He isn’t even sure he wants to forget anymore.

Lionel leaves quickly after, nervous and drained. He leaves the apple, as far as he’s concerned that’s the Institute’s problem.

\--

Even as the years pass Lionel thinks of them. He can’t help but do so nearly every day and certainly every night in the dreams that haunt his sleep. It’s always some variation of the same, violent music and waxy fingers, his throat bleeding as his students hold out beating human hearts that ooze and sputter.

In each one is the strange addition of the man from the Institute just watching him. Whenever Lionel looks to him his gaze is drawn unerringly to the man’s eyes. Only the man’s eyes.

He cuts down on course work, takes a sabbatical and then proper leave when he simply can’t function the way he used to. He’s so tired all the time, so stretched thin he feels chewed on, mashed between teeth and swallowed. 

Eventually Lionel pulls himself back up again, enough to return to work and only drink himself to sleep on the nights he thinks he can almost remember the words to that horrible song. Through it all he laughs when he feels an ache almost like missing his students. He’s surprised, relieved and faintly disappointed when they never return to do whatever dreadful horrors they surely must be inflicting on the world.

In his office one day he finds a letter with only his name, printed in the same hand as their letter when they left him. 

‘ **See you at the Dance.** ‘

Lionel sits as he reads the line over, unable to draw any meaning other than this ‘dance’ is surely not one he wants to partake in. Still, he finds himself thinking, perhaps he’s really never known what he wants.


End file.
